IAAF council 'could not have been unaware' of doping in athletics – as it happened

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The report, announced at a news conference in Munich, said: “The IAAF council could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in athletics and the non-enforcement of applicable anti-doping rules. There was an evident lack of political appetite within the IAAF to confront Russia with the full extent of its known and suspected doping activities.”

The report, presented by the chairman of the independent commission of Wada, Dick Pound, said it was too easy only to blame the failures on Coe’s predecessor Lamine Diack, who along with his son Papa Massata Diack and other officials is under investigation by French police for allegedly taking money to cover up doping by athletes.

It added: “Failure to have addressed such governance issues is an IAAF failure that cannot be blamed on a small group on miscreants. The opportunity existed for the IAAF to have addressed governance issues. No advantage was taken of that opportunity.”

However, at the press conference Pound appeared to endorse the IAAF president when he said: “I think it’s a fabulous responsibility for the IAAF to seize this opportunity and, under strong leadership, to move forward. There’s an enormous amount of reputational recovery that needs to occur here and I can’t think of anyone better than Lord Coe to lead that.”

Coe was present in Munich, having insisted on Wednesday there had been no cover-up, and he had no intention of standing down.

The sports minister, Tracey Crouch, said: “The findings of Wada’s independent commission are extremely alarming. It raises huge questions about governance at the IAAF that have to be addressed as a matter of absolute urgency.”

In terms of Davies, the report stated he did not mention any knowledge of the delays in reporting doping violations when he was interviewed by the commission in June. A subsequent leaked email from him to Papa Massata Diack showed Davies discussing a plan to delay the announcement of positive tests by Russian athletes.

A commission member Richard McClaren said in Munich: “The information the independent commission has very clearly indicates that the disruption of the federation emanated from the very top – the president Lamine Diack.

“He inserted his personal legal adviser Habib Cissé into the IAAF medical and anti-doping department in November of 2011 with London 2012 and the Moscow 2013 world championships coming up. He did so to enable Cissé to manage and follow up Russian athlete biological passport cases.

“The Russian coaches around this time did not have a good understanding of the ABP process. They had mastered the evasion, manipulation and sometimes destruction of urine samples of Russian athletes so as to not produce positive results but they had not yet learned how to do the same for the ABP.

“The deliberate insertion by the president of Cissé and his actions were intended to achieve the same results of manipulation and delay with the ABP cases involving the Russians the same result as had been achieved with the urine samples.”

Commission chairman Dick Pound, speaking in Munich, gave his full backing to Coe remaining as IAAF president, despite the report’s damning verdict on the organisation’s response to Russian doping.

And shadow sports minister Clive Efford suggested there were no credible alternatives to Coe.

He said on BBC Sport: “The IAAF is clearly an organisation in need of fundamental reform.

“But Dick Pound is also saying, reading between the lines, that you should be careful what you wish for.

“If you bring down Seb Coe, you never know who might come in.”

Coe, speaking in Munich, said he accepted the IAAF had to regain trust.

He said: “I’m very grateful for the personal endorsement of Dick but he’s not somebody that pulls his punches. I was very open with him and said I was very grateful for the work he has done and I really hoped that he did not think that me or the organisation was in denial about this.

“We can’t just sit here and say we deserve trust. We don’t - we have to win that back.”

Asked how he felt about the scandal, he added: “Pained. Pained. It’s horrendous. You don’t sit there thinking this is the sport you started out in as an 11-year-old. I have one objective now. That is to get this back into safe hands.”